Five years don't make it any easier on victim's familyBy DANIEL MACISAAC
Mon, January 7, 2008
Tomorrow marks five years since the body of 30-year-old Monique Pitre was found decomposed and frozen in a farmer's field east of Edmonton.
And while a friend complains she has become just another name on the list of the city's missing women and wants her story told, Pitre's family says the anniversary represents only pain - and offers little hope.
"She was very pretty," the friend, a woman named Angie, wrote in an online comment. "She would give you anything she had to make you smile, she was smart, caring and a good friend.
"I miss her."
But while Pitre's mother agrees with that description she also stresses, "Monique and I didn't see eye to eye.
"She could be a really, really nice person," said Rose Pitre, 55, speaking from her home in London, Ont. "But she made her own life - and got hooked on drugs."
Addicted to crack cocaine, she resorted to prostitution to feed her habit.
Pitre's older brother Elmer Pitre, 39, also lives in London and confirmed he became estranged from his sister long before she moved to Alberta several years before her disappearance in November 2002.
"We weren't in touch," he said. "So, I didn't even know she'd disappeared until a police officer came to my mom's house to notify us they'd found her body."
Elmer says the family originally came from New Brunswick, and followed their military stepfather to Ontario while they were still children.
He described Monique as a skinny little girl who loved corn-on-the-cob. But he added they had drifted apart by the time they were teenagers - and he knows little about her friends or decision to move out west. "Our family is kind of torn apart," he said.
Elmer concedes it was still shocking to learn his sister had fallen into a life of drugs and prostitution - and says the fact that she was likely murdered is even more difficult to accept.
"We never talked, so that kind of makes me want to reverse time," he said.
And Rose described her own trip out to Edmonton in January 2003 to try to identify Pitre's body as "the very hardest thing I ever had to do in my entire life."
Rose said she was told by police that they do not suspect that Thomas Svekla, who has been charged in the deaths of two other prostitutes, is connected with Pitre's death. Svekla, a former mechanic, has been charged with second-degree murder and interfering with human remains in the slayings of Rachel Quinney and Theresa Innis, and goes on trial next month.
http://www.edmontonsun.com/News/Edmonton/2008/01/07/4756210-sun.html